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Senators Clinton and Kerry Submit Open Voting Bill
An anonymous reader writes "DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerrry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public. " Commentary on the bill available at the Miami Herald.
Is it just me, or do all politics lately revolve around this same theme?
;)
Corporate lobbies push for proprietary voting machines, the public interest is for open-source voting machines.
Corporate lobbies want extensions to patent laws, public interest is to reasonably limit patent protections.
Corpate lobbies want to DRM everything with legal enforcement, public interest is to have fair use.
The more explanations I hear as to why corporate lobbying is a necessary evil, the more convinced I become of how much of a negative influence they are having on our society.
...but then, on slashdot we're probably all just hopeless libertarians anyway
This won't happen. For one, it makes too much sense. But, the biggest reason why it won't happen is because the government has been bought and the owners like what they have.
Maybe Florida 2000? Where the input method could be more accurately parsed by humans than by machines?
The advantage of a hand count is that if you don't trust it, you can repeat it yourself, or have someone you trust do it. With a machine count, you have only the machine vendor's assurance.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It's not a problem of the machine miscounting. Part of the concept involved here is to allow us to be sure the machine is not intentionally lying about the results.
I don't care, but don't let that stop you from trying to tell me anyway.
This is an area where reasonable people of all political persuasions ought to be able to come to an agreement. Based on your comment, I'm guessing that you're a conservative and I'd probably disagree with at least three-quarters of your beliefs -- but the one thing we can almost certainly agree on is that every eligible voter who wants to vote should be able to do so in a way that guarantees that vote is counted. We may argue all day about policy, but the mechanisms by which that policy is created and enacted must be trustworthy if that policy is to be anything more than the whim of a few autocrats.
So, what Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, independents, and, hell, I don't know, Prohibitionists and Natural Law believers all ought to ask themselves is: if anyone, of any party or stripe, opposes this -- what possible reason can they have for such opposition; or whether, what reason that does not mark them as irredeemably evil?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Pick up the god-damned phone and call your congressman, and both of the senators from your state. Fax them and email them as well. Then write and sign paper letters. Mail them.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here:
Strangely enough, Open Source voting code is far less important to me than the paper ballots themselves. Code correctness is only a small piece of security. First, I personally have no way of seeing into these voting machines to validate that they're running the code they say they're running. Sure, you can show me a printout of "OSVote2008.cpp", but what does that prove? It proves exactly that you have a piece of paper with code on it. It does NOT prove that's the code running inside the machine.
Or what if it is? What if I have totally trusted, verifiable code running in the typical Windows machine? What's to prevent a virus or other piece of malware inside from hijacking that code and switching enough votes from one candidate to the other to help throw the election?
Code isn't the answer. Physical tokens (in this case paper records) backed by judges performing spot checks, is ultimately the only trustable way to count an election.
John
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
A felon that has served his/her punishment, in the form of a sentence, should no longer be considered to have a societal debt. Otherwise, the person is still being punished long after the expiry of the sanction.
If a person can expect to be punished for the rest of their lives, regardless of the declared sentence length, then there is little reason for that individual to bother working toward rehabilitation. Under that circumstance, an offender may as well embrace the life of an outlaw, since that is how society and the state chooses to treat them regardless of the actual, official punishment.
Either a person can regain their acceptance by state and society by serving their punishment, or there is no hope of regaining that acceptance, creating an underclass of less-than-citizens. Consider the implications; arguably, this already exists.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
the only real problem with last years election is that for most of /.ers, the wrong guy won. the us civil rights commission did two exhaustive studies of florida. guess what? nothing. no fraud, no intimidation, no disenfranchisement. sorry go home. the press did a thorough recount of the ballots. every scenario. guess what. bush still wins. if you want the links, i'll find them, but we're finding voter reg. fraud in ohio, but oops, they'er democratic. and washington state. please. dead people voting, "discovered" ballots, 500 people registered at the same address. recounts until the democrat wins.
i'm honestly taking sides, because i think there's going to be an amount of chicanery on both sides. but if this is your kool-aid, and you focus on voting problems, a system which has served us for 200 years, then you're living in la la land. the 1960 election was won by fraud. nixon didn't run around the country for years claiming he was robbed, etc. if you're unhappy, how about volunteering next time, as the democrats had to pay campaign workers, while the republicans had 1 million volunteers. oh, and lastly, if you're hanging out at kos, oh nevermind...
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
I am a felon, technically. I was convicted of a crime I never commited, because I couldn't afford a lawyer and legal aid was turned down because I have a job. I served a year in jail because some drunk woman claimed I beat her. She later recanted (the police assumed she was threatened to do so), and didn't show up at the trial, but it was enough to convict me.
Felons, guilty or otherwise, should not be punished for the remainder of their life. You may as well leave people in jail if they're going to be punished for ever.
This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election...
As much as I'd like to believe it was a conspiracy that cost us the election, I just see too many redneck wackos with their gun racks and SUVs and 'W the president' stickers to believe that there isn't a very large portion of this country that willingly supports devolving back to the horse and buggy age as quickly as possible.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
If someone has served their sentence then they have "payed thier debt to society", so why shouldn't they be able to vote? It seems to me that allowing ex-cons to fully participate in society would help rehabilitate them. (Though I have nothing other than my gut feeling to back that up.) Disallowing them from ever voting again would seem to send a message that they are not part of society. If society rejects them why shouldn't they reject society?
Also, if ex-felons form a large enough voting block to swing the outcome of an election, that probaly means there is something deeply wrong with the laws that made them felons in the first place. I seriously doubt that the murderer block vote would ever be large enough to be able to get murder legalised; but those convicted of drugs possession[1] on the other hand might be able to influence drugs laws.
[1]Is this ever a felony? I'm not up to speed with you crazy foreigners' laws. If not, finding a suitable example is left as an exrecise for the reader.
sig
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
How can you now be sure? What part of the Constitution says the goverment can even take away one's right to vote? The 15th amendment states that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof".
So either felons are not people or states are already in violation of the constitution by denying them the right to vote at least for the senate (even while in prison). And what is the problem with felons voting anyway? Maybe they'll vote for people that will repeal the laws that convicted them? For example, maybe the mass of people convicted on drug offenses will vote to end the drug war? Awesome... the drug war is stupid.
The prison population shouldn't ever be so large that they should really affect the vote anyway. And if felons are ever are that large of a group then God help us all if they can't vote.
Increased risk of a machine breakdown is worth it compared to increased risk of widespread vote tampering via a single SQL command!
Of course, the background check part is a bit dumb -- they should have people audit the code, and run background checks on them. And I hope they mean they just can't tranfer the final copy of the code over the internet; with GPG the internet should be secure (and if it's not, they could just ask the NSA for some help).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The only reason corporations have power is that they have lots of money. The only reason lots of money is important is that a trained monkey with lots of money will win over Abe Lincoln with a stack of fliers in the back of a Honda Insight.
Now, if you had a well-informed populous with sharp critical-thinking skills this wouldn't be the case. But that's not what we have and it isn't.
So, the only way to get corporations out of politics is to teach children how to reason. Good luck.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They're already illegal.
The problem isn't contributions; it's that it costs so damn much to run a serious campaign and candidates have to spend 12 hours a day raising money instead of being out campaigning. Why does it cost so much? TV ads!
We need to reduce the cost of political ads on *our* public airwaves.
Others have been having fun extending your logic, and I certainly don't want to be left out:
- Either you'll die in Texas or you won't. Seems that if you cannot prove you'll die in Texas, you won't die in Texas. So get yourself to Texas right now!
- Either your wife is pregnant with a girl or a boy. Seems that if you cannot prove she's carrying a boy, you must not be having a boy. So paint the bedroom pink.
But unlike dying in Texas or having a girl instead of a boy, there's a burden of proof involved here. And you've got it ass-backwards. The burden of proof rests on the state, not the voter. It's not my responsibility to make sure that the machine I vote on isn't stealing my vote. The state bears a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee auditability and transparency to the voter. They must be able to prove to us that our votes were accurately counted. If they cannot prove that the election wasn't stolen, it must be presumed to be stolen, even if we conversely cannot prove that it actually was. The burden of proof is on them, not us.They failed at this wherever they introduced Diebold vote counting machines. They had plenty of time to prepare, they had our tax dollars, what did they do with it? They bought pretty black boxes that made voting "fun" even as they removed the auditability of the voting process. Now they can't prove the election wasn't stolen in those districts. Oops. And this will happen again, and again, in future elections, including ones whose outcomes you may not like.
It's related to the notion of a conflict of interest. The appearance of a conflict of interest is ethically considered to be a conflict of interest. If you're an FDA commissioner, for example, the burden of proof rests on you to prove that your second job at Novartis won't affect your objectivity when approving their pharmaceuticals. If you can't prove it, then the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, which means you've got a conflict of interest and should step down. It's not our job as consumers of FDA-approved drugs to prove that your heart isn't pure and to be on guard whenever we swallow a pill. We pay taxes so that we don't have to worry about that.
(Merely disclosing your conflict of interest as you take a position- yoo hoo everyone, by the way I may have a conflict of interest in this job I'm about to take- has become fashionable in the past, oh say, four years, but it's not ethical- you shouldn't be accepting a position at all if it places you in a situation where you even appear to have a conflict of interest.)
And the first salvo goes to Candidate H. Clinton.
Write up a legislative proposal in which most everything sounds good and simple, honest and true. Bury a couple of things in it which are clear attempts at tweaking election results in the favor of the Democrats.
The real key issues here are the election-day registration, and the votes for felons.
Election-day registration is, to me, a nightmare of an idea. Without any undeniable proof of citizenship or way to enforce one and only one vote per person, I can envision buses full of illegal aliens being sent from one precinct to another, adding votes for whatever party is paying them. Over the top? Ridiculous? Perhaps... but then, who would have thought we'd have had a local party rep paying people (WITH COCAINE) to fill out batches of bogus voting registration forms? That happened in Ohio in 2004.
Votes for felons? Well, the current law says they don't have the right to vote. Whether or not that's the right thing to do is certainly debatable. But it's clearly an attempt to generate votes for Democrats -- statistics show that a large majority of felons would likely vote that way.
If Republicans back the bill, they're giving Democrats a potential (and depending on your views, perhaps unfair) advantage in the next elections. If they don't, the Democrats will make the cry "They're against honest votes!" to the media. Repubs are kinda stuck, since they have no way of doing line-item votes.
Now... if a politician actually wanted to FIX the system, instead of twist it to their personal favor, we'd resolve the issue of proving citizenship and voting only once. The first is hard, since the US doesn't really have "citizenship papers" like most other countries. The ink-on-the-thumb solution used by the Afghans and Iraqis seemed a pretty simple solution for the second one.